Quote of the Day (Judge John Woolsey, on “Ulysses”)

“I hold that Ulysses is a sincere and honest book, and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed by its rationale . . . The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men, and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, (James) Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”—Judge John Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, delivered Dec. 6, 1933

For all his sensual appetites, James Joyce claimed to abhor pornography. Yet ironically his masterpiece Ulysses became the storm center of an obscenity case that would go the longest to establish the right of the author to deal with previously taboo subjects frankly and seriously.

The case, argued before Woolsey of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, at the headquarters of the City Bar Association, revolved around a sometimes maddening, yet always provocative, work—one damned as obscure and dirty by detractors and hailed as a landmark of modern fiction by many critics. The novel forced Woolsey, a 56-year-old expert in admiralty law with a taste for good literature, to sign on November 25 that reading the novel the last summer “almost drove me frantic,” and that even now he needed “a little more time to make up my mind.

An official complaint in September 1920 from John S. Sumner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice abruptly ended it serialization in the American literary magazine The Little Review. In officially banning the finished book two years later, the United States Customs Service scathingly denounced the high claims already being pressed for the novel by its admirers: “If it could be argued that books abounding in obscenity, filth and rottenness are books of undoubted merit and literary value, then this book is a masterpiece.”

Unfortunately, over the last several decades in the United States, many books of “undoubted merit and literary value” had, in fact, been declared “abounding in obscenity, filth and rottenness” by the authorities, including Leo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. In the case of the last book, a Boston jury had been instructed by a novel to consider only 24 pages in isolation from the rest of the mammoth work.

Under the circumstances, it became the height of literary chic to smuggle the book into the country in light-blue paper jackets, one copy of which could fetch hundreds of dollars. So quickly were copies snatched up that T.S. Eliot could not find enough to go around when he assigned it for a Harvard course on modern literature that he taught in the 1920s. In all, about 30,000 copies of the novel were sold in France, its place of original publication, up to 1933, mostly to U.S. tourists.

The court case that resulted in the formal publication of Ulysses in America was the work of a proverbial riverboat gambler. Brash and brilliant publisher Bennett Cerf had offered Joyce $1,500 for the American rights to the book and promised to fight the ban. But, if his fledgling business venture simply went ahead and published, it would be out all the costs of typesetting, printing, and shipping in bulk if a court ruled that the book was obscene. By contrast, by simply having an imported copy seized at customs, Cerf only forfeited the cost of the copy, an advance paid to Joyce, and legal fees.

The seizure at customs almost didn’t come off. On May 8, 1933, the copy that Cerf had intentionally intended to be captured—including copies of critical reviews that he could introduce as physical evidence—came back to America on the ocean liner Aquitania. This being one of the hottest days in the history of the city, customs inspectors were hustling passengers off. Even the insistence on the part of one of Cerf’s agents that his suitcase be opened must have struck them as mighty strange.

Cerf’s attorney, Morris Ernst, had timed the case so that it would be heard by Woolsey, who two years earlier had found no obscenity in two bestselling sex manuals by the English author Marie Stopes (whom I examined in a post several weeks ago). Woolsey also allowed outside evidence to be introduced, which Ernst used to advantages, marshaled the opinions of hundreds of educators, writers, clergymen, businessmen, and librarians.

Woolsey’s eventual ruling, announced the same week as the repeal of Prohibition, was so sophisticated, magisterial and eloquent that it sent the forces of American Puritanism reeling on a second front. He created an important precedent by steering away from the old concept of the impact on Impressionable Youth and to “what the French would call l’hommeyon sensual—who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry…the same role…as does the ‘reasonable man man’ in the law of torts.”

Acknowledging the book’s famous difficulty, Woolsey found it “brilliant and dull, unintelligible and obscure by turns”—but nowhere did he detect “the leer of the sensualist.” For that reason, he ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic and could be admitted in the U.S.